Growth of Cloud a reflection of a push towards Opex models: Thomas Duryea

Many businesses have made the move towards Cloud and managed services, and this has impacted on the reseller community in a number of ways.

One business that has worked hard to benefit from this transition is Melbourne based IT infrastructure solutions provider, Thomas Duryea Consulting.

Thomas Duryea Consulting chief executive officer, Andrew Thomas, said the discussions he has with clients these days tend to revolve around whether they can move that to a type of Opex or on-consumption model, as well as what are the Cloud-style options are.

“Two years ago, if we would go and sell to a customer a product refresh of their infrastructure, and on the secondary site a disaster recovery refresh, that would have been two sets of sales,” he said.

“Now what’s happening, more often than not, is customers are wondering what their options are for the second set of infrastructure that they would have previously bought.”

If a reseller does not have the chance to take advantage of that aspect of the deal, then they tend to lose out.

“But if you are able to take advantage, then your sale changes from a Capex deal to an Opex one, where you realise the money for potentially three years,” Thomas said.

So in addition to getting the deal, he said the value of that deal will be stretched out over a three year or longer period.

Opportunity in change

Thomas Duryea is a business that has transitioned from a product/project focus to services delivery through managed services and Cloud.

Thomas admits it was not an easy task, but the way the company approached it was by listening to its customers.

“Instead of going three or four years ago and deploying this type of infrastructure speculatively, we asked our customers where they see it going and what sounds relevant to them, as well as what they would see as something they might purchase or consume,” he said.

From that perspective, it was very much about disaster recovery for Thomas Duryea.

“What we kept hearing was that people were happy with their current infrastructure but they wanted to talk about where their disaster recovery site would reside,” Thomas said.

In response to that need, the company started to build its solutions around disaster recovery and ended up with what was essentially a Cloud service.

Thomas said that solution was relevant to its market because the company were responding to their exact requests.

“So we build out that disaster recovery infrastructure and that has just continued to evolve to become stronger and being used for more elements of customer needs,” he said.

Despite the strong push in this direction, Thomas admits to it a “continuous journey” for the company over the next 10 years, as a lot of conventional solutions continue to be sold.

The difference is that more and more customers that previously bought products now tend to buy it as a service.

“We plan to continue to add new services, as in the future they may be different types of infrastructures as a service,” Thomas said.

Fame game

Thomas Duryea may be onto something. He was recently inducted into the ARN Hall of Fame, making him the youngest member to receive the accolade.

Thomas says he was “genuinely humbled” by the award and it was further recognition that he did not expect.

“It was pretty special to be recognised by people that are genuinely my mentors and whom I have been looking up to over the years, and in some ways, modelled what they have done,” he said.

He also admits to have received a lot of congratulations.

“It is tremendous to be recognised for my work and what we have contributed as a business to the industry,” he said.

After receiving the award, Thomas said his customers and vendors now feel more than ever that they have “chosen the right partner, because we are seen as one of the influential resellers in the community”.

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